Posts Tagged ‘The Palace of Dreams’

Ismail Kadare has been a prolific writer of fiction, although a good deal of it is still not available in English translation, and for a long while novels that did appear in English were actually translated from the French rather than the original Albanian. Some of the novels deal with late twentieth century Albanian politics – like the one I’m writing about here – whereas others are more allegorical, or deal with Albanian history and mythology.

The Great Winter (Le Grand Hiver) deals with the break between Albania and the rest of the socialist camp in the early 1960s, pitting Enver Hoxha against Nikita Khrushchev, the Stalinist against the de-bunker of Stalin. It’s a very long and detailed novel which in many places is much more like a drama-documentary than actual fiction: think recent televised reconstructions of historical events and you have the idea. The times, the people and the attitudes may feel like ancient history now, but the hopes and fears of the characters were very real at the time – the first split in the socialist camp, the isolation of one of its members, and the possibility of war.

In some ways, I suppose, it’s meant to be socialist realism: along with the main (fictional) character Besnik, a young translator and journalist who is deeply involved with the crucial meeting at which the rift finally comes into the open, and who is plagued by guilt that he may have mis-translated at a crucial point, thus precipitating events, there is a myriad of minor characters presented in thumbnail and more detailed sketches as a cross-section of Albanian society of the time. One gets quite a clear impression of the limitations and restrictions on life in a strictly-controlled state, with impressions of secret police lurking in the background; equally there is still a great deal of youthful enthusiasm for the construction of a socialist state, and national pride in being able to stand alone.

I kept being reminded of some of the epic Russian novels I have read, and certainly a list of all the characters and their part in the story to be able to refer to, would have been a help while reading; the careful and detailed end-notes clarifying the manoeuvres of politics at the time were useful.

In the end I found it a very depressing novel. Firstly, the hero gives up – initially through neglect and then later almost through deliberate choice – his fiancee and upcoming marriage because of the momentous importance of the events in which he has become involved: there is no time for the personal. He finds himself anew through political commitment at a time of crisis, in an existential manner. Secondly, it’s depressing because, of course, everything in terms of politics, socialism, enthusiasm for building a new world, has now completely vanished, almost as if it had never been – all that will and power and energy wasted. And this does not mean that I approve of all the evils of those times and hanker after Stalinism: I just wish that some of the bright hope and enthusiasm of those days had survived.

I have found myself wondering about Kadare’s attitude to Albania and its rulers at that time; into some of his more allegorical works – The Pyramid, for instance, or The Palace of Dreams – criticism of various aspects of totalitarianism and personality cults may be read, but this novel, and another similar one which I shall probably re-read soon, The Concert, appears quite fair and balanced in its approach. I wonder what a reader in a century’s time will make of such a novel and such a writer. And yet both are needed, to preserve the memory of what once was and how people once were…

The craziness, rank insanity even, that seems to have gripped Britain and the US over the past months has shocked me deeply; it’s also recently set me scanning my bookshelves looking for the literature of strangeness, madness and insanity: and there’s plenty of it.

Let’s start with two novels whose narrators are both involuntarily interned in some kind of mental hospital, from which they tell their stories and communicate their opinions: Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum, obviously, and Siegfried Lenz’ The German Lesson. Grass particularly, in all his work, was keen for Germany to come to terms with its horrendous history; the European project, flawed though it is, has been part of ensuring peaceful co-existence in our continent for several generations.

Two novels that present us with a world where insanity has taken over: the second volume of Anatoly Rybakov’s stunning Arbat trilogy, Fear, shows us the lives of a group of Muscovite students during the time of Stalin’s purges and show-trials, a world in which nothing makes sense and there is no way to save yourself if you have been randomly marked out for doom. Similarly, Jonathan Littell’s award-winning The Kindly Ones takes us inside the mind of a German intellectual who is one of those engaged in planning and carrying out the extermination of the Jews: we see how his work ‘makes sense’ to him inside his own Nazi bubble, and it’s the stuff of nightmares. Because these are both based on actual events, somehow Kafka’s The Trial pales a little alongside them, even though the inescapability of K’s situation is what really terrifies. But again, the Albanian Ismail Kadare’s novel The Palace of Dreams with its similar trope, is again rooted in reality, and gains more power from this.

It’s not only twentieth century writers who confront us with madness: Lear’s Fool has the licence to say anything, and tells the truth to power, and in the end dies for it; in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, there is business to be done and profit to be made from the selling of dead souls – non-existent serfs – in tsarist times. In Alamut, by Vladimir Bartol, a twentieth century writer who sets his tale back in mediaeval times, we are with the sect of the assassins, apparently so in the thrall of hashish that they are prepared to sacrifice their lives committing deeds ordered by their master, because the mythical heaven with its freely available virgins awaits them.

Ben Marcus, an American writer, approaches strangeness from another angle, removing the usual and commonly accepted sense and meaning from words and imbuing them with different ones, torturing our minds and creating a semi-hallucinatory effect in his narratives: The Age of Wire and String is a truly weird read, which you cannot take too much of at once… when even the language does not behave in the ways you expect, then we really are lost.

Perhaps the most horrific novel I can mention is by the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago: Blindness. I believe it has been filmed and I’m not about to watch it. Gradually all the inhabitants of a city inexplicably go blind, and a world of chaos, violence, cruelty and insanity descends as people’s basest instincts are freed: it’s a kind of Lord of the Flies with grownups, on a grander scale. I persevered with it; it’s a very powerful read and one I’m not sure I will have the guts to go back to. In a final twist in the tale, it transpire the collective loss of sight is not permanent…

Somehow, though, the most relevant text seems to me to be Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. Here is a novel in which truth has no meaning: it’s not Pontius Pilate’s bland question ‘What is truth?’ but the malleability of any fact, idea or notion to serve the needs of those in power: now where have we met that recently? Winston Smith sits in his cubicle at his speakwrite making the news say whatever he is ordered to make it say, and removing all evidence of changes. How do we, can we, check the veracity of what we are told? Winston’s personal madness is that he sees the contradictions, remembers what was and it does him no good, just as it did no good telling voters that a certain candidate was a serial abuser of women, a narcissist and an inveterate liar… in such a world, O’Brien is right, Winston is the insane one. I find myself hoping that truth is not stranger than fiction…

It does seem a little unfair to put so many writers and nations together under ‘other’ but you will understand what I mean when I say that there is not enough time to read everything I would like to, and that some countries and authors will just have to wait for my next existence…

I’m glad I read Don Quixote once. I’m not sure I’ll have time to come back to him, but I did understand why the Spanish love him, and I learned quite a lot about the development of the novel in its early days.

The Portuguese writer Jose Saramago has intrigued me and I’ve read several of his novels; Blindness, which I believe had been made into a film and which I’m definitely NOT planning to watch, is one of the scariest and most horrifying novels I’ve read. Almost everyone is struck blind over the course of a few days, and the anarchy and human vileness which is released makes the world of Lord of the Flies seem like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic. It’s stunning, and fearsomely convincing. However, it’s Antonio Tabucci‘s Pereira Maintains that I have liked best from that country’s literature. He conveys the spookiness of the long Salazar dicatatorship very effectively indeed.

I’ve read several Italian novelists. Umberto Eco I’ve written at great length about elsewhere in this blog if you care to look, so no more about him. Primo Levi I have found very moving. He was an Auschwitz survivor who eventually committed suicide, but not before writing a powerful memoir, If This is a Man, and an intriguing, semi-autobiographical novel inspired by his life (he was a research chemist) called The Periodic Table, which I think is a masterpiece, especially the final chapter. And I love the lighthearted feel of The Garden of the Finzi Continis, by Gregorio Bassani, with the hidden undertones of menace in the background… but if I had to pick the very best, then I’d undoubtedly go for Giovanni di Lampedusa‘s The Leopard, a stunningly beautiful and lyrical tale of the emergence of modern Italy and the disappearance of an era seen through the eyes of a man who knows it must happen, wants it to happen and knows it makes him redundant, inescapably part of a past that has gone forever.

I also have to mention the AlbanianIsmail Kadare. Older friends of mine will be acquainted with my fascination with the country, largely due to listening to propaganda broadcasts from Radio Tirana in the evenings. So when I came across translations – mainly into French, but some into English, of this astonishing writer, I was hooked. Broken April is set in the tradition of the kanun, or blood-feud, a historically Albanian thing, with all sorts of rules about who you can and can’t kill, and when. The Pyramid is an allegory of sorts about his own country under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, while telling the story of the building of the pyramids in ancient Egypt, and The Palace of Dreams creates a bureaucracy to rival Kafka‘s. And then there are realistic novels set in the Albania of the fifties and sixties as she fell out with the Soviet Union (‘social imperialists’)and came to ally herself with the Chinese, The Concert, and The Great Winter. He is a masterly chronicler of his times and his country, and an entertaining novelist.

I’m glad to have been able to get to know (I’m sure merely skimming the surface) the literature of so many other lands; I do think it’s sad how many people I meet who, though they may venture far from our shores on holiday, never do so in the realms of reading. What they have missed…